


She Moved Through the Fair

by ButterflyGhost



Series: City on a Hill [6]
Category: Zombies Run!
Genre: Death Fic, Drug Use, Gender-Neutral Runner Five, Irish Runner Five, Other, Season/Series 02, Songfic, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-10
Updated: 2018-08-10
Packaged: 2019-06-25 12:44:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15641016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ButterflyGhost/pseuds/ButterflyGhost
Summary: It will not be long love, 'til our wedding day.





	She Moved Through the Fair

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for Season Two onward.

 

_Nearly there, Five. My Five._

~*~

 

It’s become something of a tradition now. On a clear night, when the surrounding land is clear of zombies, we’ll light a bonfire in Abel and sit around it, tell stories. Usually, these bonfire nights are cheerful affairs. Of course, a bottle is passed, and sometimes other substances. I prefer not to partake but cannot find fault in those who do.

 

Sometimes Sarah partook. Not often, never much. But sometimes after a hard mission, after a blow. After Chris died we sat around flames. On that occasion, I partook. I watched Sarah through the woodsmoke, as she tilted her head back to blow her own smoke. The lines of her throat were exposed, the dip between her clavicles was shadowed. She glowed in the firelight and seemed to glitter more. She sharpened around the edges even as the world around us softened. Of course, she always was sharp-edged. She always glittered, my Sarah. Like her smile, Sarah was a knife.

 

No, no, That’s not true. That was not Sarah, not all of her. She was more than the acid of her tongue, she was more than the violence of her unacknowledged grief. In her hidden self, the most secret curve of her smile, Sarah was never a knife. And even when she cut the deepest she was never cruel. Not to me. With at least one person she could be gentle. In the nest of a tent, flaps down, dim light filtering through the fabric, she gentled. Blunt rough fingers, bitten down nails - she would brush my skin with them, would drag down, her touch so delicious, so delicate. She stroked across bone and muscle, set the nerves tingling and followed with her tongue. She would dip her head, kiss the track her fingers drew, dip her head further down. Her mouth was sweet, her lips -

 

Well. That’s all gone now. Whatever honey, whatever strength there was in the blade of her smile, whatever comfort in her touch. Gone.

 

Tonight around the fire we Wake her. Tonight I partake and nobody is surprised. People share their stories of her. What can I share?

 

There’s too much, it’s too personal. I can’t describe her. I can’t put her secrets out there for others to peer at, to handle, to paw. Is it not enough that they know I loved her, that she loved me? Everything else we kept in the cocoon of a sleeping bag, in the safety our post-coital embrace. Some secrets must never be told.

 

The stories have stopped, and silence is falling. I know it is my turn, that they are waiting for me. I know this, I feel the weight of their waiting - but I don’t know what to say. There is nothing to say.

 

And then I hear him, in memory. My mother’s Wake, my father singing. He sat at the foot of the coffin, and everyone else’s words had run out. Everyone in that room was waiting for his story, the most important story in the room, save my own, unspoken. The lover’s story of the beloved. Everyone had been waiting for him to speak.

 

And my father couldn’t speak. I remember that. He had not spoken all night. He blinked, caught my gaze and smiled; sudden, shocking and sharp. Closed his eyes, opened his mouth to the silence and sang. Sang for my mother, sang for me. He sang all the grief that the world has known since the first death. The first Mother, Father, Child, Lover. They died. They all died. We all, all of us, we all go down into darkness. And that is normal. That is right. Our dead have not done anything we will not do, have not gone anywhere that we will not follow. All the grief of all the billenia is perfect. It’s natural, just the way of things. Death in life and life in death. You can’t have one without the other. Simon should have known that. Sarah did.

 

And my father sang that out, the perfection of death and the sorrow of it, and the hope. On a grey day in Donegal, he sang for us all, sang into silence 'til all the words ran out.

 

I open my own mouth now and sing. Sing it for all of us, all of them. For my mother, my father, all the ones who went before. And I sing it for the particular, the singular. I sing as Venus rises, glittering through campfire smoke, shining through my breath. I sing for Sarah, I sing for myself.

 

I see her then, on the far side of the fire. For the blink of one perfect moment, she is looking straight at me. She looks at me and smiles her secret smile.

~*~

 

_And she went her way homeward_

_With one star awake_

_As the swans in the evening_

_Move over the lake_

**Author's Note:**

> This is the song that Five and their father sing. (Minus the swan verse.)
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dyUsXgL7ow


End file.
